“... of mischief (‘it never occurs to you you’ll be rejected’). In interviews, she claimed both James Boswell and Giuseppe Verdi as ancestors; it’s not impossible, with the middle name Boswell and a mother née Verdi, but there’s a whiff of family romance to this self-construction. She wrote little about her mother, though it’s clear their ...”

“... gave a reading at the Keynote Club in Manhattan. Kallman and another Brooklyn student, Walter James Miller, were in the audience, with Kallman sitting in the front row giving the two international pederasts the glad eye. Afterwards he and Miller went backstage. Miller was tall, blond, Anglo-Saxon and (a friend who was not a ...”

“... To Sotheby’s where I’m reminded of a lunch given for Alec Guinness in 1989 when I sat next to Lord Charteris, the Provost of Eton and previously the Queen’s Private Secretary. Talking of A Question of Attribution, then playing at the National, he remarked: ‘Of course, the question everybody asks is whether the Queen knew and whether he knew that the ...”

“... to give way to interiority: it became a psychic injury, a ‘thorn in the spirit’, as William James put it, an injury done not to the body but to the mind by violence, or by any unspeakable or unassimilable experience. In the 19th century and much of the 20th these mental wounds were understood to be represented in the body by such symptoms as ...”

“... The wage-slave works on a thing, but sees his work as alien, because he’s doing it for the lord of industry, who pays him a wage: ‘A definite social relation between men assumes the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things.’ ‘That’s the crucial sentence,’ Rose says. I looked it up in my own copy to check I understood it, and found it ...”

“... has in BSkyB, a stake which proved sufficient to have Murdoch’s 30-year-old college dropout son, James, appointed chief executive of the company, in the face of opposition from other shareholders. When I say News Corp is ‘his company’, I mean it’s a company of which he owns about 35 per cent, the exact amount varying from time to time as his ...”

“... herself was solitude: ‘Don’t you know you are happiest while I withhold,’ she wrote to Judge Lord in 1878, ‘don’t you know that “No” is the wildest word we consign to language.’ Writing to Austin in 1863, Bowles sent his best to Dickinson with a hint of snark: ‘to the Queen Recluse my especial sympathy – that she has “overcome the ...”

“... extravagantly vulgar suffer from Sutherland’s sceptical attention. The Gods, Some Mortals and Lord Wickenham (1895), by ‘John Oliver Hobbes’ (Pearl Mary-Teresa Craigie), inspires the tough comment that it is ‘depressive and “sensitively” written (i.e. almost impossible to read), in the style fashionable in the 1890s’. Quotations are deployed ...”

“... the weather has improved: here at the point of annihilation, all our brothers and sisters, We ask Lord God to acquit us all. Pound, too, at the end of his ‘personification’, gets Villon’s drift quite beautifully, in a prayer for the poet and his friends which draws directly on the same envoi: God damn his hell out speedily And bring their souls to his ...”

“... that constitutions at home and abroad were unsettled – and that the Prince Regent seemed a Lord of Misrule: they did not know when the Great Reform Bill would be passed, as prologue to the stable reign of Victoria. In times like these, Abstract Ideas have great power. David Bromwich does (with proper suspicion) include one or two good anecdotes, to ...”

“... admirers would ever have called him an intellectual. Nor would that description have fitted Monty James. Nor A.C. Benson. But Benson understood what far more brilliant performers in the Classical grind failed to understand – that syntactical knowledge and command of prosody were not enough. He found Warre’s contempt for anything in the curriculum which ...”

“... to head up the cosmeticians of cash, money make-over quangos. Welcome to the nouveaux aristos: Lord Rogers, Sir Cameron Mackintosh. Welcome, masters of spectacle: the designer Stephen Bayley and Ken Robinson (who Bayley glosses as ‘in charge of lavatories, parking, visitor flow’). Jobs for those who missed out on Channel 4, Arts Council ...”

“... of letters by Alexander Pope. He then hired someone, possibly the out-of-work actor and artist James Worsdale, to dress up as a clergyman and deliver to Curll by night some printed copies of Pope’s letters as well as some manuscripts. Curll duly advertised these and sold them under the title Mr Pope’s Literary Correspondence.As Claudio says in Measure ...”

“... Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important public ...”

“... Jerry Bruck which took apart the case for Alma’s ordering of the symphony – conductors such as James Conlon have reverted to playing the movements in the same order that Mahler did. It makes a huge difference, Conlon has written, to hear the ‘meditative beauty’ of the andante before the ‘acerbic, ironic’ scherzo. The assumption of the Lehrer song ...”